CSF 2026, Day 2, Panel 2: Maritime Strategy and the Future Navy

Now to lead us uh to lead our next panel is our very own professor uh Kathleen Walsh uh professor of national security affairs and Kate the panel is yours. >> Thank you Mike. Uh good morning. Good morning Admiral. Good morning distinguished guests, students and others. Uh we have the pleasure of course of moderating this very esteemed distinguished panel. Uh, usually when I do this, uh, Mike asked me to do this, I try to find something of interest that's not in the bios, but this panel is too good, so I'm not going to do that this year. Um, we're going to start out with, uh, our first speaker, Mr. Brian Clark, who is, uh, going to speak to us on the topic of building a relevant US Navy fleet for 21st century deterrence and combat. Uh, this work uh, by Brian and others is uh, impacting the current CNO and OPNAV's current strategic thinking. So, uh, really interesting, uh, material. Uh Brian is a senior fellow and director of the center for defense concepts and technology at the Hudson Institute, one of the uh premier think tanks specializing in naval operations, electronic hardware, autonomous systems and wargaming. Prior to that, he was senior fellow at CSBA or the center for strategic and budgetary assessments where some of you might know him from uh where he was there leading studies for the office of net assessment, office of secretary of defense, DARPA and others on emerging technologies and future warfare. He has also been special assistant to the CNO uh and director of the commander action group where he helped to develop Navy strategy and initiatives across key warfare domains and personnel readiness. Uh he also worked uh from 2004 to 2011 on the Navy headquarters staff among various other experiences. Uh Brian is going to be joining us virtually from Washington. So he'll be our first speaker. Uh I'm going to give all the bios first and then let our speakers go in order. Uh next will be our own Dr. Dr. Andrew Ericson, professor of strategy at the China Maritime Studies Institute, of which he is a founding member and CMSI, correct me if I'm wrong, Andrew, is celebrating his 20th anniversary later this year. So, congratulations. Uh, if you're not already familiar with Andrew's work, you should be. Uh, he's over the way in in uh Sword uh MLH for those of you here at the War College. Um, he's had a very long and accomplished service at CMSI. Uh, and is also a China Aerospace Studies Associ Institute associate. uh has taught courses and electives programs here of course at the war college uh and as well as at Jansai University and for our flag officer tailored education. Uh and then uh next will be Dr. Sarah Kerberger a repeat visitor here at the current strategy forum. Uh she is academic director at the institute for security policy at kill university and vice president of the German maritime institute. Uh she was previously assistant professor of sonology at Hamburgg University and a naval analyst with ship builder TKMS. Uh she's also the author of a volume on assessing China's naval power uh technological innovation, economic constraints and strategic implications as well as several other volumes that she was a co-author or co-editor of on China uh related topics. Uh she uh as many of us here have testified before the US China Economic and Security Review Commission. uh her work on China's undersea warfare uh and her research as well goes into issues of PLA and modernization, Chinese defense industrial development and military technology cooperation between China, Russia and Ukraine. And then finally uh to my right, Dr. Eric Labs. He's senior analyst uh for naval weapons and forces at the Congressional Budget Office where he's worked since 1995. He specializes in issues related to procurement, budgeting and sizing of the forces for the department of the Navy and the Coast Guard. Uh you know follow the money most important thing. Uh Dr. Labs has testified before Congress numerous times and published many CBO uh reports uh and uh as well as articles and papers and academic journals and conferences including the N US Naval Institute's proceedings, SEPAR magazine, uh Naval War College Review, Foreign Affairs, Security Studies and more. uh he has also worked for the institute for foreign policy analysis in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has been a visiting scholar at the center for international security studies at the University of Maryland. So, as promised, a very distinguished and experienced panel. Uh so, without further ado, I'm going to let them uh share with us their big ideas. Uh so, Brian, if you can hear me, over to you, please. >> Uh great. Uh thank you very much, Kate. I appreciate the kind uh u welcoming and uh also introduction. Uh and it's an honor to be there with um friends and and uh fellow uh analysts. I'm just sorry I can't be there in person. Um but I wanted to talk briefly about some of the work as you mentioned Kate that we've been doing uh for the Navy looking at future fleet design. Uh this work has been going on for a couple of years now including war games that we conducted up at the war college and uh that work has been um uh I think very helpful in terms of guiding a way that we can develop a fleet design for the future that is both uh affordable and sustainable and also able to address the operational problems and challenges that the Navy faces. Uh so I'm going to go through a few slides to kind of capture some of the main elements of the study that we're writing right now um to present to the CNO in the next month or so. So the reaching back into history, recent history, um I pulled this from a study we had done when I was working in NOZ uh back in the 2010s. Um but it kind of shows one of the challenges that we're facing and I'll talk in a second about how it continues today. So the the Navy's maintained about a 100 ships deployed um overseas continuously for the last several decades uh certainly since the cold war ended. Um if you look on the left hand side here that's the uh green line that's about the number that's the number of ships that have been um deployed on any given day. Um but in the in that time the fleet shrank substantially um and that we were able to maintain those ships deployed because we increased the size of the forward deployed naval force. So we based more ships overseas. Um and then we also did some things in terms of shrinking uh the number of days that a ship had uh available to it to do underway time when it wasn't deployed. Um so if you look on the uh right hand side you can see one of the the tools the levers that we employed to be able to get more deployed time out of ships was we just took away underway time that they had for local operations. So um on the right hand side on the bottom what that shows is the number of underway ships uh total minus those that are deployed and you can see that number continues to go down uh at least during that time frame the 10 years uh represented there from 98 to 2008 2010. Uh the other thing we did was we increased the length of deployments in a lot of cases and we see that obviously happening today. So this this trend of trying to squeeze more out of a shrinking fleet uh is not a new phenomenon. Uh and if you look at kind of where we are today, this is current data from the Navy's uh deployments uh and underway time over the last five or six years. And you [snorts] can see the the brown line is the number of ships that are deployed and underway. Um and then you can see the blue line is the number deployed total. And the reason the deployed is higher than the deployed underway is because we count um for deployed naval forces based overseas as deployed even if they're not underway. So you end up with this um continued um about a 100 ships are considered deployed on any given day um even though the Navy has shrunk some in those years. Uh and the way again that we were maintaining this fleet um uh in a deployed status was by squeezing the amount of underway time they have that is not deployed time. So if you look at the the the gap between the green and the brown lines on this chart, they start to converge over time to to today when we're really squeezing down the number of underway time uh the amount of underway time ships have when they're not deployed. Um this is important because it's kind of our seed corn for how do we develop new tactics, how do we gain proficiency, how do we experiment with new operational concepts and technologies. Um, and it means that we're sort of reaching a limit in terms of how much more we can squeeze out of the fleet. Um, which without increasing the FDNF like we've done in the past, um, or just accepting the fact that we're going to have less deployed presence. And that that's a problem because if you look at uh history um in terms of um what has been the Navy's deployed presence and what's been necessary to support uh deterrence day-to-day and also crisis response. Um this chart shows u going back to 1941 the level of intensity of uh Navy surface fleet deployments. That's the blue line on the top there. That's the amount of deployment um that we've maintained um as a time series. So on the very right hand side um that means you know we've had about 100 total ships deployed 100% of the time um over the last you know at least 100 ships deployed over the last um 80 years and obviously many cases more than that. And then as you go to the left, you see um that we've been had higher levels of deployment um less at the time all the way to the far left hand side, but you can see during World War II, we had a very high intensity level of deployments. And then the red line shows combat uh deployment intensity, which again um very low all of the time and then you've got these very small periods um where you've got much higher levels of intensity for combat deployments. Um but it but what it shows is that we need to have a level of uh fleet deployment uh overall um to be able to have this ability to respond to crisis and do deterrence. So we can't let it continue to shrink um but um as we can see from the previous chart uh we don't have a lot of options at this point to maintain um the deployed force at the levels it has been um without growing the fleet. Uh the natural conclusion then is well we should just grow the fleet because we need to u maintain the ability to do higher levels of deployment. Um and this you know this this chart shows us that we're going to have our have period periods where we have to maintain much higher level of deployment. Um and one other thing that this chart shows is if you look at the text box there on the top um as you get to these higher intensity deployments uh certain capabilities tend to be demanded and higher capacity than other capabilities. So you end up with certain capability needs rising up and because we have a multi-m missission fleet um multi-m missission combatants um every TM I need a specific capability I have to deploy a multi-m missission platform to provide them which means I'm deploying a large number of people and a tail to support that ship um and then it creates a pretty robust uh deployment even if I just need anti-ubmarine warfare or integrated air missile defense and so we have to come up with a way to satisfy these demands that will continue to occur. Um, and the natural uh conclusion then is we need to grow the current fleet in its current form to be a bigger version of today's Navy. And that's what you get uh with the Navy's ship building plan. So if you look at the top here um that shows the projected operations and sustainment costs associated with the FY27 ship building plan that the Navy just issued. On the bottom, it shows the uh ship procurement costs associated with that plan. And this plan basically shows an effort to grow the fleet in its current form to uh be able to satisfy the needs of a potentially more challenging uh threat environment. Um the problem though with that is uh the ONS costs are going to be probably unsustainable. Uh the top part of this chart showing the operations and sustainment costs uh only shows them increasing with inflation as opposed to increasing with the larger fleet uh that we're likely to have in the future. based on this chart on the bottom. So, if you're going to grow the fleet uh in its current form, you're going to have to accept much higher operations and sustainment costs to support that fleet. Yet, the Navy is only projecting that those operations and sustainment costs will increase at the rate of inflation rather than also increasing with the size of the fleet as well. Um, which suggests they're not seriously considering the impact of having to maintain and operate and uh crew uh a larger fleet in the future. Um so this is one natural limit on our ability to grow the fleet in its current form is the operations and sustainment costs necessary to uh maintain it. The other limit is on the industrial base. Um if you look at this chart on the lefth hand side this shows the the um number of ships uh launched um in a fiveyear basically a 5-year rolling average um since the 1940s all the way through today. Um so you can see it's obviously a cyclical effort. Um and then on the middle you can see the number of shipyards that are providing those ships. Um also eb and flow based on the demand signal. We have more shipyards in some cases. Uh when we have more demand, we have fewer shipyards when the demand goes down. Um so for ship for the ship building industry, it's a very feast or famine type of situation and these boom and bicycles incentivize them to not want to invest in a lot of capacity that they're going to only find uh goes after the demand signal uh abates. uh following a big build cycle. Um and so that plays out on the very right hand side chart where uh ship builders have allowed the time between contracting for a ship to be built and actually laying the keel for that ship. Uh that led that to increase uh over time. So that black line there is that time between contracts awarded and ke being laid. Um, and that's makes sense because that's the time when you're doing your uh supply chain establishment, you're buying your long lead items, you're establishing your workforce, you're preparing to start building the ship. Uh, and you can see once the ship starts, the time between uh keel and launch stays about the same over time. So that the challenge is really in the um industrial base behind the ship builder um to be able to support higher rates of ship building and those supply chains are going to be very difficult to build out to support a bigger fleet um because those companies are not going to be incentivized to establish capacity they might not be able to use once you get to the next downturn which is inevitable based on history. So we may not be able to grow the fleet in in its current form because of industrialbased concerns as well. So, we're developing in our fleet design a fleet that is achievable with the industrial base we have um and that is affordable within the operations and support costs we're likely to be able to maintain. And you end up with something like this, which is a version of today's Navy that uh is not too dramatically different than where we are now. it's rebalanced uh from larger surface combatants and carriers towards um smaller ships that are maybe more personnel efficient um and then towards support vessels um that are going to be able to sustain operations in a protracted conflict and support what we're going to be proposing in terms of hedge forces that help to address the shortfalls of this fleet. Um because as we saw in the earlier chart when fleet demand uh increases when the demand on the fleet increases as you go to the left hand side of that chart you need specific capabilities in higher capacity. Um and so the way to provide that may not be to buy more of these multi-m missission combatants. The way to the way to supply those needs is probably to have tailored or specialized capabilities that you can deploy when the time comes that you need those additional capacities. Uh and that gets to how do we analyze well what are those needs you're likely to have. Um so that general purpose force that I showed in the previous slide uh if you analyze it against all the potential scenarios it might face it'll fall short in different scenarios because it's just not a bigger version of today's Navy. It's a different and even smaller in some cases version of today's Navy. So the the some scenarios like uh an ASW surge um in the GUK gap because of a large submarine deployment from Russia or mine clearing in the Arabian Gulf or um trying to defend Taiwan um and Luzon Strait from uh a invasion by uh China. Those are scenarios that traditionally have forced us to think about having to grow the Navy in its current form to be able to address them. And we're proposing that instead we should think about using hedge forces or tailored forces as the Navy now calls them uh to be able to address the specific capability needs of those scenarios without growing the multi-m missission force uh that we're all uh familiar with today and that we're proposing for the future. These tailored forces would exploit um one of the few industrial advantages that the US has um which is its boat building industry. Yeah, we we can talk and I'm sure others will talk about China's ship building efforts and how robust they are um and how they're growing a fleet that's larger than ours. Um but this is one area where the US has potentially an edge uh is in uh being able to build smaller craft and smaller vessels. Um these can be part of the basis for a set of tailored forces that help us to fill the gaps between the general purpose force of um the previous slide um and the capability needs of different scenarios um which gets us to the force design we're proposing which is essentially to take the general purpose force and complement it with hedge forces or as uh the CNO calls them tailored forces that draw upon um uncrrewed systems predominantly uh combined with mission systems. um and integrated to be fielded to support particular scenarios and geographies where we're going to find ourselves falling short uh with the general purpose force that we're able to build uh and sustain within our industrial and fiscal limits. So, this is the basic construct that we're driving toward in our um fleet design study and that we're working with the Navy on and doing a series of war games around. Um we anticipate being able to publish the results of this in the next couple of months. Um but I'll stop there and I will turn it back over to Kate. Thank you. >> Thank you very much, Brian. And for the students in the room, uh Brian was kind enough to give us a longer version of this, an hourong version of this yesterday, which was wonderful. This was the 10-minute version. So when we tell students you have to be ready for both, this is a great real world example of doing so. Uh so having looked at US concept and fleet design, let's talk about China. Andrew, >> uh thank you very much. uh greatly honored to be here to offer some personal perspectives and food for thought on the subjects of what we're up against and what should inform our efforts. Uh I have three overall points for your consideration. Uh number one, uh China under she poses a tremendous urgent challenge. Uh, number two, the key to competing, deterring, and preparing for the worst lies in the vast differences between our respective systems. Understanding those, uh, leveraging those, uh, mitigating those where we must. And three, um there's no getting around the central importance of Taiwan, the lynch pin of the first island chain, which itself, as we've just seen, uh is home to three out of the fi five global scenarios of priority uh that Brian just uh showed there. Um at the head of this uh threat is Xiinping uh who will turn 73 on June 15th. He's China's most uh powerful and ambitious leader since Mao Zadong himself. He's taking longtime Chinese Communist Party ambitions to unprecedented levels. And by all appearances, uh his statements, his actions, uh he wants to go down in history for achieving control over Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party's ultimate uh prize. Accordingly, she has charged China's entire party state military system with ambitious uh goals. By 2027, China's armed forces are to afford him a full toolkit of operational capabilities to threaten to use or in a worst case to actually use against Taiwan. By 2035, China's military modernization should be basically complete. China seeks to grow in comprehensive national power visav the United States to such a degree that it achieves a strategic stalemate, counterbalancing and blunting the exercise of US power to such a degree that Washington could no longer prevent Beijing from achieving its core objectives. By 2049, and likely before, China is to achieve a world-class military, including a world-class navy, forces second to none. For the PLA Navy, the goal is to largely mirror US Navy force structure with far larger numbers of holes, but applied to a somewhat different mission set. In service of these goals, China has repeatedly expanded its military and naval strategy. Xiinping as my colleague Ryan Martinson has recently written in uh China Maritime Report uh 54 on CMSI's website. She is China's first navalist national leader and arguably I know I'm saying this in before a room of experts but I agree with it the world's greatest navalist national leader since World War II. And Ryan and I say this in part because in his 13 plus years in power, he's brought more resources to bear and overseen more force structure expansion over a longer period than any other postwar national leader. This all adds up to a potent whole of nation approach. China's military and maritime development already reflects stunning superlatives across the waterfront. Not only has the world's largest shipyard infrastructure produced the world's largest navy, coast guard and maritime militia by number of ships, but more broadly, China also has the world's largest maritime economy and civilian sectors. However, for all these strengths and advances, China also has significant weaknesses, particularly over the long run. These include devastating demographic decline as well as potential uh potential decision-making bottlenecks imposed by a party committee system in which commanding officers and political commissars share leadership particularly in real time contingencies with communications limitations as may well occur in submarine operations. China's system has vulnerabilities that we can target with innovative concepts of operations. As we compete to best effect against shei and his party and pursue peace through strength to deter war if possible and prevail if called to do so, we must reflect deeply on our resp the respective strengths and weaknesses of our very different systems. And uh Toshi in his wonderful address to us this morning has already highlighted one of these critical areas um namely the extensive personnel removals that Xi Jinping has made across the entire party state military system. Now these kinds of removals have been an endemic feature of the PRC since its inception in 1949 and the party long before that. But nevertheless, uh, Xiinping has clearly shifted this into high gear in recent years. What does this all mean? Uh, I would submit to you that multiple things are true at once, and we must not miss the forest for the trees. Namely, there are a lot of very significant details, but the overall picture is a forest of military capabilities that continue to develop and flourish. Despite the removal of dozens of flag and general officers, China's military in general, its navy in particular, and the defense industry that supports them all, continues to advance steadily. PLA Navy force structure continues expanding rapidly. China's Navy has initiated dual carrier operations in the South China Sea and the Western Pacific. Even as key officers involved in the CHOP chain have been removed, it all continued regardless. Since 2022, China has systematically conducted large-scale exercises against Taiwan, constantly incorporating critical new components without apparent delay or failure. And throughout the 2020s, thus far, China's day-to-day military activities near Taiwan have increased steadily year on year. A tiring, intimidating all domain pressure campaign that gets at some of the very types of efforts that Toshi was referring to this morning that the PLA prides itself as having achieved in its history and and seeks to reboot in new ways and apply moving forward. What can explain this progress despite the removals? Even as we must consider the churn associated with these removals to be a heavy tax on the PLA, I see several offsets and compensating factors. First, she can bring resources to bear more readily and extensively, I would argue, than any foreign counterpart. Second, China has an extremely deep talent bench from which to draw. Third, there is significant personnel redundancy. Key [clears throat] example, the PLA Navy is run not only by the commander and the political commasar in the construct I earlier mentioned, but more broadly by a dozen member party standing committee. A lot more robustness there and room for removal. Fourth, and Ryan Martinsson, my colleagues research again shows this in depth, disciplined policies prioritize the selection of frontline officers such as destroyer commanding officers for war fighting ability, not personal personal connections. We are thus faced with a China under Xiinping preparing relentlessly to advance Beijing's unrealized sovereignty claims with no greater prize than Taiwan. Taiwan's fall would be so comprehensively devastating for the US and our allies and partners that I call it a defeat from which we could not retreat. The challenge is great, but the overall implications are clear. We must urgently go allin to deter she from achieving control over Taiwan and continue to push his timeline to the right in this regard. This in turn will distract and delay his achievement of objectives regarding 2035 and 2049. This is all connected as part of a larger effort and a larger system that we must disrupt. I maintain to you that it's worth pulling out all the stops as best we can, even if it means accepting risk in the outy years, because should Taiwan fall on our watch, it would impose such devastating setbacks as to imperil the foundation of many other critical interests and objectives. Things would never be the same again. Whether we deter she and frustrate his aggressive ambitions will critically shape the coming years of world history. The stakes are high and the clock is ticking. Thank you. >> Thank you Andrew very much and uh we are on time. So please Sarah. >> Yeah good morning everyone. Um it's a great honor to be here I think for the f third time now as your resident European you might say. Um yeah it's it's wonderful to be back and on such a great panel. Thanks. So um unusually for me I'm not going to concentrate on China really here because [laughter] Andrew Erikson uh has taken that role and I'm going to um offer a couple of observations from a different vantage point as a former shipyard employee um of the TKMS shipyard Blowman Foss in Hamburg. It's the shipyard that built a battleship Bismar which you may have heard of long ago. So we abandoned the b building of battleships in Germany for for some reasons. Um [laughter] yeah. So anyway, um my job at that shipyard um almost 20 years ago I started that job and um it was basically building up a small intelligence unit within that shipyard which was in crisis like the whole ship building industry in Europe was in crisis naval ship building and um I was really pleasantly surprised yesterday when I heard William Tooti Mr. toti the acting under secretary of the navy um not engage in any industry bashing or fingerpointing towards the shipyards but rather admitting that the current system is perfectly geared to designing exactly the outcome it produces. So I thought that was uh good good to hear because this is a a problem um I think it's a shared problem among many allied nations not necessarily in Korea and Japan but in many other European nations um that we have the same kind of systemic issues to deal with and during my own time in that industry I lived through three rounds of painful restructurings mergings and uh demergings of shipyards layoffs with hundreds of people being let go. Um it was frankly pretty depressing situation overall and many of the best people who had alternatives went to different industries. So they they just went never to return. [snorts] Now very suddenly we have a completely different situation. The government is throwing enormous amounts of money at the defense industries to quickly rearm. But where to get the people that you need? TKMS, the shipyard where I worked, is looking to hire 1,000 qualified people short term. Where are they going to get them? And I'm not talking about welders. People think shipyard workers need to weld steel and that's it. It's not about just the welders. It's people able to manage incredibly complex projects involving hundreds of suppliers and system integration, solving complex system integration issues. communicating with all these you know government procurement officials and all these different instances and the problem if you look at the timelines of ship building projects how do they come into being you have maybe years of a definition phase like what do we even want what kinds of requirements dependent on the threat analysis that you have at that point in time so you try to project into the future what your warship that's going to be in service for 30 or even 40 years is going to perform duties according according to what you think needs to be done when it comes into service. But um you may be off like when I worked at TKMS, we were thinking that those um air defense air warfare destroyers that we'd build the F1 and 24 class were woefully wrongly conceptualized because all we ever needed to do with warships in the future was fighting pirates. Right? That's what we thought. But when the Houthies started attacking you know shipping in the Red Sea suddenly we realized oh how useful that we have at least three of these you know ships now in our inventory. So this is what I mean is the problem is defining defining the roles of ships that will be in service basically uh at a time when you may no longer be at work uh maybe already be retired. And the problem that arises from this fact from these enormous timelines long years of definition and then contract negotiations before steel is ever cut. You know the design phase is also long then steel is cut then the ship is built one or two years and then goes into service. The problem that you have in terms of the humans, the people working on these projects is if you have enough rounds of layoffs where you send all the 55 plus year old people into into early retirement with a severance package is that you may no longer have a single person on your yard that has ever actually done this complete thing. You know, ever seen an entire project come into being. And this is the loss of critical experience. This is really an important point that I want to make. It's not just that you can c hire a couple welders from somewhere, a couple people from from other industries. It's this experience of going through this and having already committed a lot of errors and learned from them because the new team that comes onto the job that may have never done it before will do exactly the same things wrongly as others have done before. So you don't have a learning effect. And this is a crucial difference to China because China by throwing enormous amounts of money at the ship building industry and creating these incredibly large series of ships, building the exact same type of ship like 50 times, 70 times in the case of corvett for instance, they they create a very good learning environment. So this is why they've become so fast and so efficient because they're basically just building the ships, the same type of ship again and again and again and again. The same people have have the chance to learn. So disruption is a problem. Unstable demand, unstable build cycles is a huge problem. And the human resources factor goes far beyond finding people capable of welding steel. So this is this is maybe uh one of the most important lessons. Um, so what can we do? Um, the thing is all of these things aren't really not new. We we know all these things and I've just gone back to my own literature that we use when when doing our analysis at the shipyard. Um, I I just want to mention a couple of excellent studies on exactly these issues that already exist. One is the cost of sea power, the influence of money on naval affairs from 1815 to the present day by an engineer named Philip Pew from Britain published in 1986. Super good book. I really recommend reading it. It's extremely detailed. Then of course uh Daniel Todd Michael Lindberg Navies and Shipbuilding Industries the Strained Symbiosis 1996 also super good book very very good empirically based analysis. Another uh excellent study done by Rand uh why has the cost of navy ships risen? A microscopic examination of the trends in US naval ship coasts over the past several decades by Mark Arena at all 2006. And of course there's Andrew Ericson's excellent uh edited volume on Chinese naval ship building that was published in 2016. So it it was interesting 86 96 2006 and 2016 as you can see every 10 years we have an excellent like groundbreaking study but if you go back to these things it's always it comes down to the same aspect. So the digitalization of naval ships is a key driver of the complexity and the system integration challenges and the costs and the delays but it comes down to stability and the and the demand. Japan is a country that has has a much better approach had a much much better approach in this regard and uh they created stable demand stable build cycles and were able to to have a much much more positive experience in that way. So what what's new then? What's now the press pressing issue? We've heard a lot about the problem with um vulnerability in particular of surface naval ships and um whether we still need them or not. How many tasks can be taken over by unmanned systems? I thought Toshi Yoshihara's remarks were really good about negative and positive goals. So some of the denial missions of course will be taken over probably by unmanned systems rather than manned ones. But we will still need manned systems for many many years to come for other types of missions. I would posit that um that the vulnerability in particular of surface ships should give us um pause and think about the balance between surface and and subsurface ships in the fleet. Like Ukraine has been moving basically everything sensitive underground. that is one of their key strategies for surviving this war on their energy infrastructures and everything else. Likewise, should navies think about moving things maybe under sea that are really important? So, I just I just think um balancing the fleet, the procurement cycle may may involve um a rethinking of how many submarines versus how many surface vessels uh manned vessels are useful to have. and then of course um uh integrate unmanned systems were uh possible and and doable. This is one thing. However, think also about the aspect of nuclear deterrence and how it hinges on ship building in particular um the balance between SSBNs and SSNs. It's super important thing as we saw in the Ukraine war because nuclear blackmail is real and this brings me to another point that Toshhio raised the that war is ultimately an effort uh on the human mind to try and influence the opponent and make him think that he has to give up that there's nothing that can be done and Putin is someone who has understood this concept wonderfully and the nuclear blackmail the nuclear threats have really worked well for him and deterred basically the entire western world from actually supporting Ukraine the way we could have done compared with North Korea that had no problem sending actual soldiers to the front line and fight for Russia. So this is this is a real thing and China as a nuclear power is perfectly able to I believe to learn from the Russian example in this threat threat environment that they're in. So finally some points um we also need to be look at the micro level like cognitive warfare happens on many many levels. We've heard some experiences uh from history in Toshiro Shihara's lecture currently we're dealing with with simple things like in the gray zone warfare um area that we also need to contend with. I want to mention an example is probably not well known from the Baltic Sea. The German Navy sailors were targeted with so-called fake base station attacks. So were Russian shadow fleet vessels had um equipment on board that created internet connectivity around them and some naval sailors connected their personal devices to these you know genuine looking internet connectivity had everything sifed from their devices and then next next thing that happens is that their family members get threatening phone calls. So they combine electronic warfare with a cognitive warfare operation very ingeniously. It's just one little example on the on the on the micro level um where we need to think also how to influence the opponent's mind. It can happen in many ways. Yeah. So finally how can your allies be more useful to you? I think the ship building prowess of Korea and Japan is an obvious thing. Use it. Let let them help you reinvigorate your ship building base. My personal opinion is having the lead ship built in a foreign yard and train American workers while doing that abroad and then bringing them home and have maybe Korean or Japanese experts come to America, help build the others. That might be a smooth way to do it. Um yeah, I know politics comes uh comes maybe against this, but it would be a good idea. Use your allies also for red teaming. The Ukrainians are wonderfully willing to share what they've learned and they've learned a lot. So use uh you should not think of of any concept and not not let any Ukrainian drone team try and take you out. It's it's absolutely advisable to to get them to try and test how well how resilient you really are. also use your allies for aligning your threat perceptions across the world because the people at the front lines are the ones who really know what's going on. Yeah, I think this is uh h my last point is standardization of platforms is more important for actual resilience and actual functioning than exquisitess. So let don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good. a good enough ship is actually good enough. And the simpler it is to operate, the simpler to train, the simpler to maintain, the more time it will actually spend deployed in service. So yeah, that's from my European vantage point. Thank you very much. >> Thank you, Sarah. And for our final speaker, Eric, over to you. >> Well, thank you. Thank you very much for that kinder introduction earlier. I faced a dilemma coming here today to give a presentation because I came up with two presentations. I wasn't sure which one to give. So I've decided to give both which is say I'm going to uneasily meld a set of slides with a later on a little bit of a narrative on on the strategic environment and the slides are going to start off with the industrial base. So let's let's get right to that then. All right. So the this is a slide that simply shows what the Navy is to the composition of the Navy today. The 355 ship fleet which was something that the Navy established as a goal back in 2016 is up there and the Congress sort of codified it into law only in the sense that you know it was a sense of the Congress that we should build to a fleet of that size. Currently the Navy's goal is 381 ships with the composition that you see there. They are currently revising those numbers. sometime in the next few months months I think that the new administration will the the current administration will come out with a somewhat revised set of goals. I don't know how much different it'll look from that. Probably not too different, but at least somewhat different. But the point is here is that the the the Navy is is is reaching for a larger fleet and has for quite for some time. And that is sort of the the problem here is that that the last 13 ship building plans that the Navy has had uh has projected building to a larger fleet uh they have not been able to do so for a variety of reasons. For for many years, it was a lack of resources that that prevented them from building a larger fleet. In more recent years, the last five five years or or more, it has been challenges in the ship building industrial base, which I will uh turn to uh next. This is an analysis that I did in as part of the 2025 ship building plan. So, not the one that was just released a few weeks ago. I'm in the process of analyzing the 2027 plan. There's a lot to it, uh but I haven't been able to to to to complete this. But in terms of the 2025 plan, what we see here is that increasing demand for uh tonnage being requested of the ship building industrial base. This is no surprise. If you're trying to build a larger fleet, you're going to be you're going to build more uh you're going to build more tonnage that you want to be able to push through. That the numbers have increased since 2014 by about 65%. And that is one of the challenges that we that that the industrial base is facing is that they are that as they are uh asked to do more and more with the workforces they have that becomes more challenging as they hire uh new workforces and they are they are greener. So it just takes more time to to build what is available. And the 2025 plan, which is going to be at least as is going to be um probably somewhat less ambitious of the two 2027 plan, would have that tonnage being required for increasing um over the next 10 years uh another 50 to 60% depending on which category of ships that you're talking about. You combine that with the fact that it is taking us much longer to build ships than it used to. If you compare sort of how we built ships in the 2000s, how quickly we were able to build them, we could build um uh surface combatants destroyers in 5 years, carriers in 8 years, uh submarines we were doing at 6 years. Now we were now is taking us 10, 11, you know, 9, 10 or 11 years to build those same ships. And as a consequence, that is having a a substantial effect on on on the Navy's force structure such that it is not a fleet that is as large as it could have been. If we if the United States were still able to build, United States Navy were still able to build the uh ships under the time frames that we were able to build in the 2000s, we'd have a fleet that's well that'd be well over 300 ships today. But because of those longer ship building times, we have backlogs that are uh in the yards and uh ships are not getting delivered as quickly as we would like. Um over the next four years or so, that that gap that is an average of about 20 ships and most of those 20 ships are destroyers and attack submarines. Those are the submarines that those are the ships that we need the most in the Davidson window in confronting China arguably. And if you look, this is some early analysis I've done of the 2027 ship building ship building plan. If you look at sort of what the challenges is is going forward under the new plan, it's going to get greater at least in the world of surface combatants. the World Surface Combatants with the plan to build two destroyers a year every year throughout the 30-year period plus weave in a 35,000 ton battleship every other year, you're going to see the demand for the uh industrial base to produce surface combatant tonnage to nearly double um um in relatively in a relatively short period of time. Now, conversely for small surface combatants, we kind of went in the opposite direction with the cancellation of the FFG62 program uh and the reconstitution and and the constitution of the FFX program, which is a a ship that's about 60% the size of the FFG62 was going to be. So, you actually are reducing the demand on the industrial base um for small surface combatants compared to the compared to the large surface combatant program. So, what is to be done about the industrial base aspects of this? Well, there are there are several things that that can be done and they kind of overlap with things that um uh Sarah has said which is you know we one of the things we can do is we can sort of treat our force levels as as kind of as ranges rather than specific goals not get too caught up in any particular number but sort of try to structure the industrial base to be doing engaging in in a set of continuous production so that you're always building say two surface combatants a year you're always building two attack submarines a year and whatever force structure that gives you out over the long term that's the force structure that you that you manage and you work toward. So you don't worry about getting exactly say um you know 80 104 surface combatants in the out years but something between I don't know 100 and 120 and then and in other words to provide the most steady most stable production plan for the industrial base that you possibly can. It gets a little tricky when you weave in new classes of ships, but the way you can do that is you can sort of weave in a new class um with a long overlap period before you start um uh transitioning completely to a new class of ships. Um and we're going to have to realize that, you know, US society isn't isn't what it was anymore. We don't have the same level of manufacturing base that we used to have. Only 10% of the economy is manufacturing compared to about 20% uh back in 1980 or so. Um, and if we want people to go into shipyards, whether they're in the design industrial base or whether they're in the production base, which is hot, cold, dirty work, you're going to have to pay them very well. You're going to have to pay them much, much better than you're going to pay other manufacturing sectors. And you're certainly going to have to pay them much better than the service sectors. And that is not something that has been the case uh for quite some time now. We've had attrition rates in in most of those yards are still in the 20 to 30% range. Uh they were higher earlier. some yards have have seen some improvement, but we're still struggling with attrition in in our industrial base. Um, and one of the last things uh one of one of the other things that's going to be uh that the Navy is already doing has actually done for a very long time in the submarine industrial base and is going to do do a lot more of particularly if we carry through with the battleship program is doing more uh distributed federated ship building which is that you build parts of ships in more other in certain yards and you ship them to final assembly yards. You're going to have to do that a lot more, especially especially for the battleship program. We've been doing this for submarines where half of the submarine is built in Newport News, half of an intact submarine is built in is built in electric boat and then the final assembly is alternated. We're we're replicating that with the Colombia class program to to a somewhat lesser degree, meaning that the split there is like 8020. Uh but the battleship program and other ship building programs are going to have to increasingly do that uh more and more. So let me stop there with the industrialbased stuff and then I'm going to shift to sort of a discussion of sort of the strategic environment um that the Navy is operating in. Um and this is this is paralleling very much what Andrew and and Sarah have just said. You know the strategic environment that we're living in and will likely to continue to live in for the rest of our lives is really unlike any that the US has faced in well over a century. We face a strategic adversary that has the economic, financial, military, and technological resources that equal or exceed our own. The United States at the same time, you know, we're struggling with our own economic, financial, military resources, and the competition with China takes place across all domains, but it does it is heavily located in a maritime context. So despite that inescapable reality, we continue to struggle on what kind of navy we should build. There are several main features of what the future Navy should look like for which there appears to be wide consensus. It should be larger. It should have more robotic and autonomous systems. It needs more investment in resources. It needs more shipyards building those systems. And increasingly, it needs more containerization of weapon systems and sensors. But there are a number of areas in which there is not a consensus. How big should the fleet be? We all seem to agree on bigger, but how big? And crucially, what should the composition of that fleet be? What is the high low mix of larger man systems and small manned and autonomous systems, whether that's surface or undersea? What role should foreign shipyards play in building that larger fleet? Do we build a fleet geared more towards what the Navy does 95% of the time, or do we build a fleet to deter and hopefully defeat China in an in the event a war occurs? On those issues, there does not seem to be a great consensus. Thus far, technology is affecting naval warfare at a dramatic level. On the tactical basis, the offense is still dominant. In a ship on ship group or group of ship on ships engagement, the maxim is still attack effectively first. But at the operational strategic levels of naval warfare, the the defense is becoming more dominant in my view. By that I mean you cannot as easily use naval forces to affect events on events on land against a technological and military peer. The ability of navies to affect land and large military operations against, again, this is specified against a true peer is declining in my view. Today, you can achieve local sea denial without even having a navy. And that limits a navy's freedom of action in ways that we really haven't seen in history. So, what does that mean for a conflict in the Western Pacific against a peer such as China? If we care about preserving Taiwan's status quo, let us start with the end state we need in a fleet and work backwards. What gets us into a turn a deterrent condition with China in a Taiwan scenario in light of current technology and military resources available available to us now or likely to be available us in available to us soon or if deterrence were to fail a war-winning operation. Winning here being defined as thwarting an invasion of Taiwan or disrupting or defeating a blockade coercion campaign. Nothing more because any war aims greater than that in my view are seemingly unrealistic at the with the current technological and military trends. So what is needed? what is realistically possible to have. Sure, we'd love to have fully, you know, 100 fully capable and operational nuclearpowered attack submarines, but that isn't going to happen under the current conditions. Do we want a 100 unmanned systems forward deployed in the Western Pacific armed with anti-ship missiles? Do we want 200 systems? But they would be vulnerable to attack as well. If we need to get them there, how do we do that? Do they self-deploy? That is a challenging set of logistics to do that. Do they get transported by other ships? We would need to acquire those transport ships if that's the case. Onman systems are clearly part of the future, but they are not a panacea and they come with their own host of lo logistical and operational problems to sort out, which we have not yet sorted those out. Perhaps the Navy should also consider a large complement of man missile corvettes. The Navy's 2027 ship building program includes 15 battleships. Let's say they cost $15 billion each on average. If the Navy were to buy 10 battleships instead and devote the $75 billion saved from that to a $500 million missile corvette, it could buy 150 of those ships. Which option would you prefer? In the meantime, you know, we can do gauge in the process. I recently uh published a report on sort of um using a lot of ships that the Navy already has either um recently deactivated ships or ships that it is currently laying up or ships that do not car currently carry uh weapons that they could um arm and use them. Sort of take distributed lethality, if you will, at its word and pretty much arm everything that the fleet has. That is something that could actually be done in the relatively short term, unlike say buying buying a fleet of battleships. But even more important, I'm less concerned about having enough platforms as as I am about having enough longrange anti-ship weapons and the ability to target them to where we might need to employ them in the event of a conflict. We are years away from having the kind of inventory of anti-ship weapons that we need and China already has. With all the money and energy flowing into the MUSV industry right now, we might very well be able to build those vessels before we can arm them. And that seems to me would serve no one. I offer all these comments as points of departure for discussion and thinking. As a CBO analyst, I can't really make recommendations, but the future makes me nervous and Andrew and Sarah didn't make me any feel any better about this situation. [laughter] >> Thank you very much and I look forward to to the conversation and your questions. >> Oh, excellent. Well done. Uh thank you. [applause] >> Uh exceptional work. Uh this is a teaser of some of the research and writing of our uh panel here. So please join me in thanking them for their thoughts today. [applause]